Spring Quilting

It wasn't until I was editing the photos for this post, and trying to decide on a title, that I realised how well the colours of this quilt fit to Spring. The beautiful, bright rainbow really brightens up the room, and when you look at it, you can't help but feel light and happy. Perfect for a little girls room.

There's very little frugal about this quilt, it's made from (almost) all new material, and didn't come cheap, although the main body of quilting is made from material I have had in my cupboard since before DD was born. I didn't even buy it myself, my mum saw it in her local quilting shop, and couldn't leave it there. 24 fat quarters, hand dyed, all in carefully arranged shades through the rainbow. (Although we only used 23, several of the pinks were so similar I took one out, as the quilt was going to be very long anyway). I have put off cutting up this material, trawled through many quilting books and magazines for the perfect design, but eventually it was time to just give it a go, and we decided on a really simple design, that would show off the beautiful shading without any fancy patterns detracting from the simple beauty.

First step was to cut the material, not into squares, but into strips. We were going to carefully measure each one, but in the end, we just cut along the fold lines, giving us 4 strips very close in size to what I wanted.

I worried for a while about how to keep the colours in order, as some of the shades are very similar, and in the end we decided to lay them down in order. We pinned each colour (4 strips of each) at the top to prevent them blowing away. (This is on my mum's veranda, you can see the grass in the top left hand corner, so it was a little windy.)

This type of quilt is much easier (and quicker) to sew with two people. My mum sewed each strip together as I handed them to her in order. If I had been on my own, I would have had to constantly get up and down to get each piece, and I'm sure some of them would have ended up out of order.

I was a little concerned about how to keep track of the order anyway, as so many shades are so similar, but came up with this simple strategy to keep it in order. Each time I took a strip off the pile, I turned the pin the other way. That way I could quickly and easily work out which strip to grab next. It worked too, not a strip out of order.

Once we had joined all 23 strips, we then sewed the first strip to the last one, making a continuous loop like this. I hope the photo shows what I mean, as this is the step that made doing the staggered pattern so simple and easy. We made 4 of these loops.

Each loop was then folded into quarters, and cut into strips the same size as the origional strips (so that the patches would be square). As you can see here, there was a small bit at the end left over that wasn't big enough to make another strip, but those will get used later.

Then I unpicked one seam on each strip, moving one square through the colours each time, and sewed these together (as we went). This was a little tricky, as some of the colours were hard to tell apart, but in those cases I looked back to a strong colour change, and worked from there. Again, I did the unpicking/arranging, and my mum sewed. I deliberately arranged it so that the pink colours were around the middle of the quilt, as my DD loves pink. We picked out a pink border at the local quilting shop, and found some bamboo wadding for the middle. If you haven't heard about bamboo, it's a wonderful new alternative to cotton, which is grown with far less pestasides, making it far more gentle on the environment. And it has a wonderful, silky soft feel. Seems almost a shame to hide it away in the middle of a quilt!

Of course, the quilt isn't entirely new material. The backing is a white sheet I bought at the local op shop for $4! And the bias strip around the edge is the end bits left from cutting out patched strips. It was almost exactly the right size to go around the quilt, only 4 squares left over. Quite an economical use of material really.

Doesn't it look beautiful on DD's bed? She loves it, and has been sleeping in her bed again since we bought it home. She had had a run of bad dreams, and moved back in with us full time, and I was hoping this would make a difference, which it has. Not that we mind having her in with us, in fact DH and I both sleep better with her nearby, but I also want her to enjoy her own room, which she is now doing. We bring her in with us when we go to bed, so that she isn't waking up alone in the dark.

For anyone who is thinking of trying their hand at quilting, but is afraid to give it a go, don't be. My mum and I aren't perfect quilters. We don't measure things terribly carefully, and if we make a mistake, we don't let it stop us. For example, we cut off the edge of one of the last strips by acciden, so that it was about 5mm shorter than all the other strips, but carried on anyway, and in the end, you can't even tell which one was the shorter square. I also accidently bought about 2 inches less batting than we needed (I forgot to calculate for the wider border), so that it doesn't go right to the edge, and had a similar problem with the backing, but we just fix those up, and keep sewing. In the end, these little mistakes are unnoticable among the larger quilt, a quilt that never would have been finished if we'd let ourselves be deterred by simple mistakes.

Happy Sewing!

Laura Ingalls Wilder - Quilted Memories

This is the first time I've participated in one of these blog world games, but I just couldn't resist. Miss Sandy over at Quill Cottage is having an "I remember Laura" blog-a-thon, in honour of the author of "Little House in the Big Woods", Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder books from a very young age. I think we first read Little House in the Big Woods in school, maybe grade 5 or 6? And as usual when I loved a book, I searched out all others by the same author. Her writing is beautiful, and her story of a family living simply in as they travelled further and further west was inspiring. In fact, I think I might just start re-reading them.

This weeks theme for the blog-a-thon is Quilted Memories. Quilts have always been a big part of my life. My sister and I both have memories of choosing out material, and arranging squares (or triangles, that one drove my mum mad, but I loved it.) Now my mother makes the most beautiful crazy patchwork quilts, I'll have to get a photo of one some time. Personally, I haven't done much quilting (except for the velvet ones I've posted about before, which are very simple quilts really), except for this one.

The history of this quilt goes back 14 years, to the year I was eighteen. I appliqued the 9 squares in this quilt, by hand, and sewed them together interspersed with pink floral squares. Each square was embellished with ribbons, ribbon roses, lace, and embroidery. It took ages to sew them all.

I think you can probably guess what the common theme of the quilt was? An impressionable 18 yo, I was obsessed with love and romance, and showed this by appliqueing hearts in one form or another on every square.

This was the very first square I did, and since I hadn't decided on the hearts theme, I embroidered some on later.

This is my favourite square. The original bird was a peach silk, that has long since worn away, leaving only the outline and embroidered roses. The blue colour is painted on.

I took this quilt with me when I moved out of home, and it adorned my bed for many years, until it started to grow tattered and worn (you can see in many of the pictures how worn the origional squares are), and I was well and truly over the hearts stage. In a big clean out, I was going to throw it out, but my mum, who was visiting at the time, asked for it. A few weeks later, she gave it back to me like this! She had taken apart the original quilt and saved my carefully constructed squares. She'd mended what was able to be mended, painted the spaces where applique's had worn away and pieced it back together in colours that fitted my decorating scheme at the time.

She added new appliques of dolphins (my obsession at the time), butterflies, teddies, and even this castle which she traced and painted.

This little girl she said reminded her of me as a girl, waving at the bird. (Although I don't have blond hair.)

It is still worn, but it is holding together. It doesnt normally live on our bed like this, normally it is folded at the end until bedtime, when I unfold it, and put it down the side of my bed for me to cuddle up to. It's the perfect weight and size for this, so it had better not wear out any time soon. It would be very hard to replace.

Autumn Leaves

Autumn is such a non-event in Australia. Surrounded by evergreens, the season passes with little notice other than the fact that it's getting cold. Since it rarely drops below freezing here in Brisbane, the beginning of cold in autumn is only a little milder than the mild winter cold. Which is why this liquidamber tree at my mother's inspired me last week.

I wanted to make a patchwork rug for DH like this one we made for DD last visit, but the colours we had in the velvets were limited. That's one of the problems with sewing from recycled materials, you can't just go out and buy what you need to finish a project, you have to work with what you have. Not that I've had much luck with finding what I want in craft stores when I go looking. Anyway, as you can see when we made DD's quilt, most of the velvet was pinks and reds. I slowly pulled out a pile of other colours, browns, reds, and a tiny bit of orange, and eventually picked out all the other colours I had, and was left with a beautiful array of autumn colours, that inspired me to send DD out to pick an autumn leaf from the tree.

This is the rug that eventually worked it's way out of the materials, and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out from a bunch of velvet that initially looked all pink. Because of all the agonising over colours and patterns, it took most of the day to complete this one, unlike DD's rug, which only took a few hours.

We used the bitty leftovers of the velvet to piece together the back, since none of the colours that were big enough to do it in once piece fitted in with the autumn theme.

These appliqued leaves added the perfect finishing touch I think, even though my Mum and Dad kept saying they were stars! Hopefully when we pull this rug out next autumn, as it starts to get cold, it will help us feel a little more autumny. Hopefully the little liquidamber's that I plan to dig up from around the base of my mum's tree and plant in our front garden will help as well.

A Holiday Quilt

One thing I love about visiting my mother (aside from the fact that I get to chat to her till all hours and spend time with her), is going through her material stash. She was into recycled crafting before I even knew about it. She has an entire caravan full of cut up second hand clothes, unwound jumpers, and bits and pieces she has spent years collecting. At one point, she was very into making crazy patchwork quilts. Some time I will have to take some pics of her quilts to put up here, they really are amazing.

This time though, I had a specific project in mind. Several years ago, when I moved into my first apartment on my own, we made a blue and green velvet patchwork lap rug. DD loves it, and carries it around the house to play with. I would rather it was left on her bed, covering up the board between hers and mine, so she didn't hit her head on it! The only solution was to make another rug! This time, of course, pink!

The material used is velvet, mostly from old velvet dressing gowns, which were all the fashion there at one stage. Mum has quite a collection, with lots of great colours for this project. We added in some purple and orange as well, just so it wasn't quite so pink. All red tones though.

DD had a lot of fun playing with the pieces, and some old dolly pegs that she found in a box of toys/craft stuff my mum had there.

Eventually we rescued the pieces to lay them out in a good order. It took lots of re-arranging so that we didn't have too similar a squares right together, although really, it probably didn't matter.

Then sewing them up. It's really handy to have two people for this job, as one can sew, while the other keeps the pieces in the right order. In a random design like this though, it really doesn't matter that much.

And here it is, the finished product! We found a piece of polar fleece left over from some tracksuit sewing we did for DD several visits ago for the backing. It was thick enough that we didn't need wadding, which was an added bonus. Then we gave it a quick wash, and here it is hanging in the sun. A good day's work I think.